North Star

Populism, politics, and the power of Sarah Palin.

Palin’s supporters identify with her: she represents the erasure of any distinction between the governing and the governed.

Illustration by Steve Brodner

The last time the publication of a political memoir aroused as much interest as Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue: An American Life” (Harper; $28.99) was probably in 1995, when Colin Powell’s autobiography, “My American Journey,” came out. Like Palin’s bus tour through two dozen states (from Pennsylvania to New Mexico), Powell’s twenty-three-city campaign began amid speculation, teasingly encouraged by Powell himself, that it might be a reconnaissance mission for a Presidential run, though of a more Olympian sort. “His book tour has the air of a political campaign,” the Times reported. “Not the flesh-pressing campaign of a hungry primary candidate, but rather the roped-off, walkie-talkie-directed campaign of a sitting President.” Trailed by a security detail, Powell gave a cursory news conference at each stop, fending off the more penetrating questions and aiming barbs at the crowded field of Republican hopefuls—who included Bob Dole, Phil Gramm, Lamar Alexander, and Pete Wilson. Not one fired back. “He’s probably the most popular person in America right now,” one of Gramm’s advisers explained. “Everybody admires him.” When, at last, Powell declared that he would not seek the nomination, many were relieved (including Powell’s wife, Alma, who had feared an assassination attempt).

Powell’s stately procession appears, in retrospect, to have been the last gasp of a bygone politics. He was perhaps the one remaining figure in American politics who could plausibly present himself as a hero in the classic sense—honored not only for his military record but also for his aura of remoteness. Yet the media looked very different then, too. In 1995, cable news remained the bland civic pasture of CNN and C-SPAN; Fox News and MSNBC were not founded until the following year. Rush Limbaugh was a bumptious presence—an honorary member of the Republican caucus that he had helped exhort to victory in the 1994 elections. But other noisemakers had yet to catch up. Bill O’Reilly was between jobs, having left the tabloid-gossip program “Inside Edition.” Lou Dobbs was still a business specialist, and not the ringmaster of anti-immigration furor and the “birther” controversy. And no one had ever viewed a YouTube clip.

The worlds of media and politics have been steadily merging, and today they seem all but interchangeable. When Anita Dunn, until recently the White House communications director, labelled Fox News “the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party,’’ she got the power dynamic backward. As the Republican Party, leaderless and rudderless, struggles to build a new identity based on more than lockstep obstructionism, people like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have claimed the role of ideological enforcers, turning up the heat on some suspected moderates, such as Governor Charlie Crist, of Florida, and extracting pledges from others.

Internal convulsion is an essential rite of the modern Republican Party, dating back to 1964, when grassroots activists, rallying behind the Presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, routed the Party’s East Coast leadership and realigned the Party along the Sun Belt axis. It happened again in 1976, when Ronald Reagan battled the incumbent Gerald Ford all the way to the National Convention; and in 1992, when Pat Buchanan harried George H. W. Bush during the primaries and then, in a televised address at the Convention, in Houston, thundered, “There is a religious war going on in this country.” A similar revolt is under way today, though as yet no insurgent tribune has emerged—except, possibly, Sarah Palin. Polls taken last November showed that she had alienated centrists, and a majority of people still eye her with mistrust. But this is beside the point. Populists, from William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long through Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace, have always been divisive and polarizing. Their job is not to win national elections but to carry the torch and inspire the faithful, and this Palin seems poised to do. That she is the first woman to generate populist fervor on such a scale enhances her appeal—and makes her, potentially, a figure of historic consequence.

Palin has yet to declare her intentions, or even to say whether she envisions a future in elective politics. But this, too, only heightens the drama, as she flexes her iron grip on the daily news cycle, down to its hourly epicycles. (At one point, four stories about her appeared simultaneously on Politico, the insiders’ daybook of Beltway chatter.) Palin’s national career, which began in August, 2008, with her surprise selection as John McCain’s running mate, has a permanent air of improvisation and experiment—for instance, the notorious “death panel” comment that threw the entire health-care debate into turmoil last summer, after she posted it online. (Her Facebook fan page now claims a million-plus “supporters.”)

She has plunged with equal fervor into tabloid-ready conflict, trading insults with David Letterman and feuding with Levi Johnston, the father of her grandchild, who was preparing himself for a nude spread in Playgirl just as Palin was about to begin her book tour. Even before the book was published, its score-settling account of the disastrous 2008 campaign had elicited ferocious rebuttals from, among others, McCain’s top strategist, Steve Schmidt, whom Palin accuses of having “put into motion a plan to destroy my reputation.” (He replied that her account is “all fiction.”) An ordinary politician would be reeling. But Palin understands more than anyone how interpenetrated the realms of politics and media have become. Her operating principle seems to be an observation made by Richard Hofstadter in 1954 that “the growth of the mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment.”

The message has not been lost on Palin’s principal Republican rivals, the three other private citizens being mentioned as serious prospects for 2012: Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Mitt Romney. Gingrich—the Republican Party’s putative sage, who in August offered advice to Palin (first, write a book; second, get a regular TV gig)—is now in the midst of his own tour, in support of his book “To Try Men’s Souls: A Novel of George Washington and the Fight for American Freedom,” co-written with the military historian William R. Forstchen. (Sample lines: “One hell of a cause I belong to, he thought. Damn, why does it always seem to rain on armies in retreat?”) As of late November, it was marooned at the bottom of the Times’ extended best-seller list. Huckabee already has his own Fox talk show and a new book, “A Simple Christmas: Twelve Stories That Celebrate the Holiday Spirit.” (“Joseph was Mary’s boyfriend. There was nothing unusual about a teen-ager having a boyfriend, but Mary also had a secret: She had a baby inside her, and she wouldn’t be able to hide it much longer.”) By normal—that is, non-Palin—standards, it has sold extremely well, thanks both to the author’s own book tour and to his Web site. Only Romney lags behind. His book, “No Apology,” won’t be out until March, though the stops on his tour were announced last week by his publisher.

All three are crowded near Palin in recent polls, but none have anything like Palin’s star wattage. It is the one point on which admirers and detractors can agree. From the left: “Palin is a bona fide celebrity,” note the editors of “Going Rouge,” a new anthology of anti-Palin prose, most of it published during the campaign but repackaged to capitalize on the release of Palin’s own book. “She transcends politics.” From the right: “On the campaign trail she discovered a power greater than public office: the power of celebrity,” writes Matthew Continetti, an editor at The Weekly Standard and the author of “The Persecution of Sarah Palin,” a book that combines besotted advocacy with an assault on the liberal media that “tried to bring down a rising star.”

“Greater than public office”: this phrase distills an emerging doctrine on the right, as its long-standing distrust of federal bureaucrats and costly programs careers off into full-scale repudiation of governance itself. On this matter, too, Palin has outdone the field, with her surprise announcement, over the Fourth of July weekend, that she was quitting her job as governor of Alaska in order to pursue “positive change outside government.” Some assumed that she had wilted under the mounting pressure of legal fees, the result of a barrage of ethics complaints, many of them filed by adversaries with long-simmering grievances. Others suspected that she was bored: after nine weeks of national electioneering—of TV cameras and photo shoots, of adoring crowds numbering in the tens of thousands—Juneau, Alaska, seemed a comedown, with its tiny government (forty members in the House of Representatives, twenty in the Senate), which convenes only ninety days a year. In her memoir, Palin adds another factor: noxious heckling from left-wing bloggers intent on proving that she is not the birth mother of her infant, Trig, who was born with Down syndrome. One way or another, it was all too much, and her only good option was to resign. “I knew we had just done the right thing for Alaska,” she writes, in the first person plural that she favors when discussing her “team.” “We were now going to get to fight for what is right for our state and our country.”

The fascination with Palin owes something to the way that her cultish aura mirrors, or refracts, the aura that surrounds Barack Obama, the other political figure who comfortably inhabits the nexus of politics and celebrity. It has become fashionable to ridicule Palin as a tabloid creature, but it was not so long ago that Obama was being depicted as the chum of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Even now, the nimbus of celebrity clings to him, often with deflationary effect—for instance, during his recent visit to China, when at times he seemed less the leader of a major diplomatic mission than an attractive student ambassador, genially exporting good will and posing for photographs. When CNN intercut its evening coverage of Obama’s trip with Palin’s first bookstore appearance, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the two mise en scènes seemed eerily equivalent.

For the moment, Obama and Palin divide the electorate, and are bound by a strange symmetry: born in the nineteen-sixties, the only candidates from outside the Lower 48 ever to grace national tickets, and the beneficiaries of powerful social movements that they were too young to have participated in (civil rights in Obama’s case, women’s liberation in Palin’s). Just as Obama, with his “post-racial” affect and his Ivy League pedigree, made an older African-American political figure like Jesse Jackson seem the relic of a vanished era, so Palin—with her lustrous mane and form-fitting skirts, her coddling of her infant son in the full glare of TV cameras—presented a new model of the spontaneous woman politician, free of the overmanaged self-discipline that constrains Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi.

What Palin doesn’t have is a serious program. Her book offers only the conservative dogmas of the moment—the sins of big government, the glories of the free market, the greatness of America. This isn’t altogether surprising. Obama—himself no stranger to the political uses of the book tour—was also accused of being stronger on rhetoric than on policy detail, not least by Hillary Clinton during the primaries. Almost a year into his Presidency, we now see his intentions more clearly. He means to usher in the third phase of liberal reform that began with the New Deal and continued with the New Frontier–Great Society initiatives. But these ambitions were given shape by the conditions he inherited upon taking office, and could be glimpsed only tenuously from his apprenticeship as a state legislator and then a U.S. senator.

Palin’s career—a total of some seventeen years in Alaska politics—offers few definitive clues, either, though the record looks better than some may suppose. In “Sarah from Alaska” (PublicAffairs; $26.95), Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe, who covered Palin’s Vice-Presidential campaign for CBS and Fox News, respectively, give a balanced and well-reported, if not especially searching, account of Palin’s career. They praise her for building bipartisan coalitions and for being a genuine ethics reformer at a time when the state was being mismanaged by an entrenched club of men, many of them Republicans, including the longtime U.S. senator Ted Stevens. Appointed to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, a regulatory agency, she reported the infractions of Rudy Ruedrich, a colleague on the commission who was also the chairman of the state Republican Party, when she discovered that he was “conducting political business from his state computer and leaking confidential information to a company he had been tasked to regulate.” Palin’s crusading played well with the Alaska press, and, as governor, she appointed seven reporters to her administration. Beyond this, the record is blurred. The natural-gas pipeline that she claimed as her signal accomplishment is “still theoretical,” Conroy and Walshe report, and “figures to be either her crowning achievement or her most embarrassing failure.” But there is no denying her popularity in the summer of 2008, when her eighty-per-cent approval ratings made her a tempting choice during John McCain’s search for a running mate.

Her rise was helped along, naturally, by opportunism and persistent self-aggrandizement—familiar traits, but in Palin’s case magnified, or melodramatized, to an unusual degree. Whenever “Going Rogue,” which Palin wrote with the help of the Christian journalist Lynn Vincent, leaves the subject of family joys (“Every child is created special, with awesome purpose and amazing potential”), the beauties of the Alaska landscape (“Autumn in Alaska shimmers in white and gold”), or the utility of prayer (“As the months went on, Todd’s prayer was answered by an offer for a permanent position with BP”) and turns to politics, it becomes a narrative of almost continual embattlement. It’s the outsider against the insiders, the innocent circled by wolves, whether in the Alaska Republican Party, in the “professional political caste” that stifled and, finally, betrayed her during the 2008 campaign, or in “the liberal media.” In almost every case, Palin’s own part in these conflicts is scrubbed free of complicating detail, lest it add darkening shadows to her pastel self-depiction. Even her campaign for mayor of Wasilla, in 1996, is cast as a homely contest between her vision of smaller government against the incumbent Republican’s preference “for more government control.” In fact, Palin won by attacking her opponent over “values,” in mimicry of the campaigns that social conservatives were leading in the Lower 48. Her “genius was to transform a sleepy municipal election into a philosophical grudge match,” Matthew Continetti writes, one that was “fought over three issues—guns, spending, and abortion.”

This aspect of the campaign is well known and, in any case, shouldn’t hurt her with her base. Why airbrush it? Perhaps because Palin has taken the measure of her readers and their expectations. It is one thing to commit casual ideological libel against Obama, as Palin does when she intimates that his “past comments and associations with anti-capitalist radicals would influence his economic policy,” thus implying that the true authors of the stimulus were Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers, rather than the Wall Street-friendly economists Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. But it is quite another thing to own up to an episode of election hardball in her home town—ruthlessness on a level more likely to affront the “ordinary” people on whom she holds a special claim, particularly those captivated by her image as salt-of-the-earth supermom.

She is equally circumspect on the issue of ethnicity, pointing out that Todd, whom she met in high school, is “part Yupik Eskimo” and opened her to the “social diversity” of Alaska. (Wasilla is more than eighty per cent white.)Palin, though notoriously ill-travelled outside the United States, did journey far to the first of the four colleges she attended, in Hawaii. She and a friend who went with her lasted only one semester. “Hawaii was a little too perfect,” Palin writes. “Perpetual sunshine isn’t necessarily conducive to serious academics for eighteen-year-old Alaska girls.” Perhaps not. But Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, gave a different account to Conroy and Walshe. According to him, the presence of so many Asians and Pacific Islanders made her uncomfortable: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.” In any case, Palin reports that she much preferred her last stop, the University of Idaho, “because it was much like Alaska yet still ‘Outside.’ ”

Palin’s discomfort is easy to understand. Race is often the subtext of populist campaigns; their most potent appeal is to whites who are feeling under siege by changing economic and cultural conditions. Palin’s strength with this constituency can only have grown since the last election. It’s the reason that her bus tour is passing through the small cities and towns (Fort Wayne, Indiana; Washington, Pennsylvania) where the 2008 election might have been won. Already, she has drawn thousands of fans, some pitching tents overnight in the hope of receiving an autographed book. She is avoiding major cities in the Northeast and on the West Coast, a pointed assertion of her contempt for metropolitan élites. When McCain asked if Palin’s husband was prepared for the rigors of a national campaign, Palin assured him that he was, and also that they were the couple for the job: “We felt our very normalcy, our status as ordinary Americans, could be a much needed fresh breeze blowing into Washington, D.C.”

To an extent unmatched by any recent major political figure, she offers the erasure of any distinction—in skill, experience, intellect—between the governing and the governed. As one supporter told Conroy and Walshe, “If she can run a home, she can run the government.” Palin agrees: “There’s no better training ground for politics than motherhood.” Describing the responsibilities of managing Alaska’s budget, she makes the same argument in fancier language: “Lessons learned on the micro level still apply to the macro. Just as my family couldn’t fund every item on our wish list, and had to live within our means as well as save for the future, I felt we needed to do that for the state.” Her insistent ordinariness is an expression not of humility but of egotism, the certitude that simply being herself, in whatever unfinished condition, will always be good enough.

In her speech at the Republican Convention, Palin cited the example of Harry Truman, “a young farmer and haberdasher from Missouri” who “followed an unlikely path to the Vice-Presidency.” But Truman’s early years were spent in preparation for some future exemplary role, and for the historical destiny that he hoped, against all odds, he might someday fulfill. He regarded his ordinariness as something to be overcome, not celebrated. Though often derided in his day as a “little man,” he closely studied the lives of the greats, with special emphasis on antiquity—Hannibal, Cincinnatus, Scipio, Cyrus the Great—and consciously patterned himself after them. “Reading history, to me, was far more than a romantic adventure,” he said. “It was solid instruction and wise teaching which I somehow felt that I wanted and needed.” As President, he formed a strong bond with his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, a product of Yale and Harvard, and a bugbear of Joseph McCarthy and his congressional allies, whom Acheson described as “political primitives.”

The appetite for betterment that drove Truman is strangely absent in Palin. Though she says that she was a voracious reader in childhood, she nowhere indicates what she learned about politics or governance from books, from the college courses she took, or even from more experienced officeholders in Alaska. She (or her collaborator) sprinkles nuggets from Plato and Pascal, but is more convincing when she cites a motivational maxim from “author and former football coach Lou Holtz.” When the call came from John McCain to discuss her possible place on the ticket, Palin, in her favored idiom, didn’t blink. It was confirmation of her self-assessment. “I certainly didn’t think, Well, of course this would happen. But neither did I think, What an astonishing idea. It seemed more comfortable than that, like a natural progression.” It may have seemed less natural to advisers who, prepping her for interviews and debates, were startled by the gaping holes in her knowledge. When Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard editor and writer, asked Palin who her favorite thinker was, she replied, “You.” Barnes has observed that Palin’s “Republican heroes, besides McCain, come to a grand total of two, Reagan and Lincoln.”

“Going Rogue” does indeed invoke Reagan, as so many conservative memoirs and manifestos do, although Palin’s discussion of one of his cherished principles, “Get federal spending under control,” omits the fact that Reagan himself violated it. (During his Presidency, federal spending exceeded all previous levels in the postwar era; not a single major program was eliminated.) Nonetheless, Reagan the candidate personified the ideal of the citizen politician, so important to the rise of modern conservatism, and Palin is right to draw on his example. What she ignores, though, is the fact that Reagan, like Truman, immersed himself in solitary preparation. A consultant to Reagan’s first political campaign, in 1966, when he ran for governor of California, reported that “his library is stacked with books on political philosophy.” The radio scripts that he wrote and read in the nineteen-seventies, at a rate of five a week, were models of concise argument, as were his letters to contemporaries like William F. Buckley, Jr. But then Reagan, again like Truman, aspired to the heroic ideal. Despite his Hollywood past—or perhaps to atone for it—he cultivated an air of almost imperial remoteness. “What stayed with me,” Colin Powell writes in “My American Journey” of his first meeting with Reagan, “was the paradox of warmth and detachment Reagan seemed to generate simultaneously, as if there could be such a thing as impersonal intimacy.”

This is just one of the many vivid impressions of the mighty recorded in Powell’s book, the engrossing story of the path that led him from a South Bronx tenement to the inner sanctums of institutional power. Every page is informed by an acute sense of his multiple identities, which situated him at once within and apart from the worlds he inhabited. It’s significant that he titled his memoir a “journey,” while Palin has called hers a “life.” She certainly accumulated mileage: the distance between Wasilla and Juneau is five hundred and sixty-five miles. But the sense of moral or intellectual progress is altogether absent. In this, Palin embodies the curiously arrested condition of the movement she evidently seeks to lead.

Conservatives, who used to denounce “identity politics,” have fashioned their own version of it, anchored in the culture wars, with its parallel conflicts of background and class. Palin incarnates the latest version, which is a politics not of “special interests” but of the singular self. In “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America” (1961), Daniel Boorstin distinguishes between heroes, whose higher example can “fill us with purpose, ” and celebrities—each his own fleeting “human pseudo-event”—who “are nothing but ourselves seen in a magnifying mirror.” But what about the ambitions or hopes of celebrities themselves? What is it that they really want? Sarah Palin’s uncertain future raises this question.

To judge from her book, the most exciting time in her life was the election of 2008, when she was embraced by the army of “everyday, hardworking Americans,” the “everyday folks,” and “thousands of regular Americans coming out with their signs” who mobbed her tumultuous rallies, thrilling to her odes to the “true America.” She gave them a “magnifying mirror.” They reflected her own image back to her. This adoration is kept alive today by the excited autograph-seekers in Grand Rapids and Fort Wayne, in the audience that gave Oprah Winfrey her best ratings in two years, and in the various advocacy groups that have sprung up to promote Palin for the Presidency: Conservatives 4 Palin, Team Sarah, Vets 4 Sarah, 2012 Draft Sarah Committee, Sarah Palin Radio, SarahPAC. The true meaning of Palinism is Sarah Palin—nothing more and nothing less. She is a party unto herself. ♦

Sam Tanenhaus, the author of “The Death of Conservatism,” is working on a biography of William F. Buckley, Jr.